Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Bug Data Storage Media Software The Almighty Buck The Courts Technology

Nasty Adobe Bug Deleted $250,000 Worth of Man's Files, Lawsuit Claims (gizmodo.com) 275

Freelance videographer Dave Cooper has filed a class action lawsuit against Adobe, alleging that an update to Premiere Pro came with a flaw in the way it handles file management that resulted in the deletion of 500 hours of video clips that he claims were worth around $250,000. Adobe has since patched the bug. Gizmodo reports: Premiere creates redundant video files that are stored in a "Media Cache" folder while a user is working on a project. This takes up a lot of hard drive space, and Cooper instructed the video editing suite to place the folder inside a "Videos" directory on an external hard drive, according to court documents. The "Videos" folder contained footage that wasn't associated with a Premiere project, which should've been fine. When a user is done working on a project they typically clear the "Media Cache" and move on with their lives. Unfortunately, Cooper says that when he initiated the "Clean Cache" function it indiscriminately deleted the contents of his "Videos" folder forever.

Cooper claims that he lost around 100,000 individual clips and that it cost him close to $250,000 to capture that footage. After spending three days trying to recover the data, he admitted that all was lost, the lawsuit says. He also apparently lost work files for edits he was working on and says that he's missed out on subsequent licensing opportunities. On behalf of himself and other users who wish to join the suit, he's asking the court for a jury trial and is seeking "monetary damages, including but not limited to any compensatory, incidental, or consequential damages in an amount that the Court or jury will determine, in accordance with applicable law."

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Nasty Adobe Bug Deleted $250,000 Worth of Man's Files, Lawsuit Claims

Comments Filter:
  • backups (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @08:55PM (#57639990)

    if its valuable back it up?

    • by mikael ( 484 )

      Some Linux applications store data in /tmp by default (Blender). Others don't even bother saving backups or delete auto-backups on exit (OpenOffice). Even VMWare saves incremental changes to your base VM image in separate images. Lose one of those incremental images due to some problem, and that's everything gone up in smoke.

      https://forum.openoffice.org/e... [openoffice.org]

    • if its valuable back it up?

      The most amazing thing about the backup dillemma is that it is just so damn easy to keep yourself out of no backup hell. My backup system has local, hourly, daily and weekly backups. I don't even have to think about it, except when I make the archival remote location backup.

      Whatever - the lawsuit should be against the stupid asshole who even after all of these years and all of the horror stories, kept exactly 1 set in exactly 1 place.

      Suing Adobe? Well, what if his hard drive died? Sue the manufacturer

      • Re:backups (Score:4, Insightful)

        by dwywit ( 1109409 ) on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @10:48PM (#57640466)

        It's hard to feel sorry for the guy, even if he did lose a lot of money.

        Never, ever, ever put working video files - original footage or working copies, on an external drive. It's just too slow, especially in these days of 4K and upwards. The only things I use external drives for are backups, and transferring copies to clients.

        The bare minimum for using PP effectively is: 1 drive for OS+software, 1 drive for footage, 1 drive for MediaCache, and many external drives for backups. Never ever mix original footage and scratch copies - as this guy did. As an aside, I don't clear the MediaCache until after the project is completed, the product is delivered to the client, and all original footage is removed from the editing computer and stored elsewhere - external HDDs or whatever.

        When I use the term 'drive', it of course includes multi-disc volumes, RAID, etc. But OS+software, footage, and scratch/MediaCache should be on separate volumes.

        • by piojo ( 995934 )

          It's hard to feel sorry for the guy, even if he did lose a lot of money.

          Never, ever, ever put working video files - original footage or working copies, on an external drive. It's just too slow, especially in these days of 4K and upwards. The only things I use external drives for are backups, and transferring copies to clients.

          Does not compute. Why do you feel sorry for him due to him having an inefficient workflow? That makes me feel more sorry for him! (Clueless user's work was all deleted.) I feel like there's an additional subtext to your comment that I didn't pick up.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by dwywit ( 1109409 )

            1. He lost files worth a lot of money - I feel sorry for him.

            2. It's mostly his own fault - I don't feel sorry for him.

            #2 outweighs #1, so it's hard to feel sorry for him.

        • Re:backups (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @11:55PM (#57640616)

          It's hard to feel sorry for the guy, even if he did lose a lot of money.

          Never, ever, ever put working video files - original footage or working copies, on an external drive. It's just too slow, especially in these days of 4K and upwards. The only things I use external drives for are backups, and transferring copies to clients.

          The bare minimum for using PP effectively is: 1 drive for OS+software, 1 drive for footage, 1 drive for MediaCache, and many external drives for backups. Never ever mix original footage and scratch copies - as this guy did. As an aside, I don't clear the MediaCache until after the project is completed, the product is delivered to the client, and all original footage is removed from the editing computer and stored elsewhere - external HDDs or whatever.

          When I use the term 'drive', it of course includes multi-disc volumes, RAID, etc. But OS+software, footage, and scratch/MediaCache should be on separate volumes.

          General comment here, and not a criticism, because you are correct. While we can get into the concept of who has the biggest backup weenie, it always devolves into the same thing as the password conundrum, where someone eventually says they use doubly random 256 Characters changed every minute, otherwise they are dumb.

          When in fact, this reductio ad absurdum one upsmanship is contrasted against someone who had no backup at all.

          For all of the wonderfulness of the better backup methods, the man simply would have not lost his files if he had 1 simple backup. Didn't have to be redundant, stored offsite, or on several different volumes. It isn't that the good methods aren't good, it's just that having no backup period is just division by zero.

          • by dwywit ( 1109409 )

            The description of what happened made me think he's sloppy - putting *any* working files on an external drive is foolish, and he compounded it by allowing temporary files to mix with original footage, and even worse, the only copy of that footage.

            I get by with 3 discs as described above (because I'm not really a full-on commercial operator), but there are some very fancy setups with multi-disc volumes, RAID, etc, and it's not really weenie-waving. With 4K (and higher) footage, that's a lot of data being shi

            • by SCVonSteroids ( 2816091 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @10:07AM (#57641924)

              putting *any* working files on an external drive is foolish

              If you're not very tech oriented, there's no way you'll know that.
              A normal person looks at an external drive and assumes it is the same as his own internal drive, minus being external. And there's nothing wrong with that assumption.

              • by Pascoea ( 968200 )

                And there's nothing wrong with that assumption.

                This made my brain hurt. There wouldn't be anything wrong with the assumption if it wasn't completely incorrect. I'm sorry, but ignorance of technology when your livelihood relies on technology isn't excusable. If those files were truly worth $250,000 that would seem to imply he could have/should have paid a computer nerd company a couple thousand dollars to make sure his rig and workflow are adequate for the task as hand.

                When I showed up at my last job they were running on a shitty network. (5-ish clients

        • Never, ever, ever put working video files - original footage or working copies, on an external drive. It's just too slow, especially in these days of 4K and upwards.

          Not really, no.
          Well, okay, yes and no at the same time.

          An USB 3.0 HDD's speed is indistinguishable from an internal HDD's speed. There is no performance difference. Yes, an SSD would have helped, however once you reach dozens of TBs worth of files, using SSDs becomes prohibitively expensive.
          An external HDDs performance might have been enough for encoding of final footage. The bottleneck there is usually the CPU.

          • by dwywit ( 1109409 )

            Gonna have to disagree with you about the speed of a drive in a USB3 external enclosure. Well, not the speed itself, but the speed of shifting data around.

            I just don't trust external USB drives for working files. Backups and transfer, yes.

            • You can disagree as much as you want, I have tested them many times, as a matter of fact they are so reliable nowadays that I no longer have a HDD in my desktop. I have a NAS and an external 4TB drive which I use to store my stuff, including one of the backups.
              Of course I back up to more than that. My important files have one mirror on the NAS, one synched with Backblaze B2, one on my external drive and the work files are on a SSD in my PC.

              • by dwywit ( 1109409 )

                Good for you. Video workflow is quite specific. There are folk better qualified than you or me who make those recommendations. Check out the PPro forums.

                That's why a licenced copy of PPro is worth it - access to the forums where working professionals share their experience.

        • While you’re here video editing expert...

          I’ve got a copy of premiere pro running on a win10 machine at work. It’s great, but I want something similar for playing with at home. Something on linux or bsd would be fantastic but I guess there is nothing. Something on win10 that has a one-time purchase price instead of a recurring sub is my next best thing. What are the best options?

          It will be mainly for cutting up shadow play footage, splicing it together, simple transitions and mixing in audi

          • by dwywit ( 1109409 )

            I believe Premiere Elements is still available as a one-time purchase.

            https://www.adobe.com/products... [adobe.com]

            As another poster mentioned, the DaVinci product is free (and it's a famn good product), but the best thing about the licenced Adobe products is access to the forums.

        • by xlsior ( 524145 )
          Never, ever, ever put working video files - original footage or working copies, on an external drive. It's just too slow, especially in these days of 4K and upwards. The only things I use external drives for are backups, and transferring copies to clients.

          "slowness" it not an issue anymore: a typical spinning platter hard drive will be slower than the 5Gbit/sec USB 3.0 bandwidth to begin with -- And even if it could saturate the bus, it still won't be noticably slower than an internal SATA III drive whic
        • by jaa101 ( 627731 )

          Never, ever, ever put working video files - original footage or working copies, on an external drive. It's just too slow, especially in these days of 4K and upwards. The only things I use external drives for are backups, and transferring copies to clients.

          You do realise that some external drives are eSATA or, for fast external SSDs, you can use Thunderbolt. These aren't going to be slower than internal drives.

          • by dwywit ( 1109409 )

            Not denying they're fast, but the workflow of video editing is unlike many others, and I've yet to see a setup using external drives out-perform a system with internal drives.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt for external drives gives near native SATA performance. A lot of people with Macs that can't be upgraded use external drives for video editing that way, and some big YouTube channels (e.g. Linus Tech Tips) use 10G ethernet to a fileserver.

          That's one reason why Adobe Premiere uses a cache, the idea being that you can use slower drives for the original files. Although these days slow is a relative term.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        He says he lost 500 hours of video. At 4k you need about 318GB per hour of raw captured video, so his collection could have been up to 160 TB. A 500TB storage server would be around $10k so if his work really is with $250k it seems pretty reasonable to invest that much in backing everything up.

        There is also insurance for this kind of thing. Most contractors have insurance against liability for their mistakes, for example. It's not all that expensive.

    • He actually made two huge blunders. 1) Didn't have a backup. 2) Deliberately told Adobe software to use the Videos folder on his external drive as a temp folder, then told it to clear that temp folder, which it dutifully did.
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      No backup - no pity. Seriously, not having a backup _is_ asking for it. No, this is not victim-blaming, this is pointing out extreme stupidity.

  • testdisk ftw (Score:5, Informative)

    by ThePhish ( 154000 ) on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @08:57PM (#57639994)

    as soon as you realize this happens, "testdisk" in a controlled environment is the ONLY solution i use.

    done boneheaded things several times, testdisk saved me each time... and i highly doubt adobe did zero overwrites or anything other than a simple delete.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      as soon as you realize this happens, "testdisk" in a controlled environment is the ONLY solution i use.

      done boneheaded things several times, testdisk saved me each time... and i highly doubt adobe did zero overwrites or anything other than a simple delete.

      Exactly this. A thousand times. People don't realize how easy it can be to recover data.

      And even if you don't have experience, it ain't hard to justify professional recovery services if $250,000 is at stake. Common sense.

    • as soon as you realize this happens, "testdisk" in a controlled environment is the ONLY solution i use.

      done boneheaded things several times, testdisk saved me each time... and i highly doubt adobe did zero overwrites or anything other than a simple delete.

      From a cursory read of the complaint I understand that he ran a program called Recovery 4, but that only gave him the folders and no files. I'm a bit curious how the court would look at this kind of "self diagnosing", should Adobe be liable (which seems rather unlikely in itself). I'm guessing the case would be dismissed without prejudice until he shows up with an expert witness who can testify that the files are not recoverable.

    • If there is nothing interesting about your storage, yes testdisk is great. It should be used on an image of the media, preferably a read-only image. Do NOT try to recover from the original media, if it's valuable to you. The only thing you should do with the original media is make an image of it, then unplug it and move it to a different room.

      If you're using raid, volumes, or other more interesting storage recovery is still possible in most cases, but it gets more complicated. There are a lot of ways to g

      • yes testdisk is great. It should be used on an image of the media, preferably a read-only image. Do NOT try to recover from the original media, if it's valuable to you

        While in general this advice is good, it doesn't actually apply to testdisk. Testdisk does not restore in place (i.e. by "fixing" the filesystem's inodes and directory entries to point again to the files), but rather dumps the files it finds to another disk.

        Actually, testdisk is filesystem agnostic, and recognizes the the data to be recovered by their signatures at beginning of file, and then works basically with the assumption (often true) that each file occupies a number of consecutive sectors. Assumptio

        • If the data is actually worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, or tens of thousands, do you think having a backup might be a good idea? Or should you run recovery tools on your only copy, in a system that apparently has bugs software that randomly deletes stuff or a dodgy drive controller or whatever caused the problem, while you're under stress and the adrenaline and high heart rate has cut your cerebral cortex function by 40%?

          You should have put another copy in the other room LAST MONTH. Do it now.

    • Re:testdisk ftw (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Zuriel ( 1760072 ) on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @10:43PM (#57640450)

      Absolutely not.

      As soon as you realise you've lost a quarter of a million dollars worth of data, you turn it off and hand it over to a data recovery professional.

      There are all sorts of ways to recover data which are appropriate for recovering your collection of downloaded movies or whatever. At $250k you're well into 'call an expert' territory. He could probably have had that data back for a few hundred dollars. The $250,000 in lost data was caused by him ineptly fumbling around trying to do it himself.

      • Re:testdisk ftw (Score:5, Interesting)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 ) on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @10:53PM (#57640478) Homepage

        One question though, if you actually do lose that data, actually really lost, how exactly do you prove in court it actually ever existed, the mind boggles, somehow because 'I say so', I am pretty sure will not cut it. It is kind of funny, it is creative content, how do you prove it's value without the work being available to demonstrate it's value, your time and effort, well, who gives a fuck it is worthless if the creative work is unappreciated by those who would pay for it, thus defining it's value. I would counter sue for legal costs, with the claim it is all a fraudulent lie and prove that by the other person not being able to prove the opposite. Somebody as a very, very, bad lawyer.

        • The problem is, they really did have a bug deleting people's files.

          And, his testimony that he had the files is already evidence that they existed.

          So if that is all the court has, then that adds up to, they deleted his files.

          The question of value is a bit harder for him, but perhaps he has additional video files that were not deleted whose value can be established. If so, then he'll likely get paid. If not, then he's going to get some token amount.

          This gets settled, they don't throw a fit or else they'll end

          • by Kjella ( 173770 )

            The problem is, they really did have a bug deleting people's files. And, his testimony that he had the files is already evidence that they existed.

            It's like claiming to the insurance company you had a $250k painting on the wall after a fire, if there's no receipt, no photos of it, no witnesses to collaborate it then that "evidence" is worth absolutely nothing. The court will not accept your version of events simply because you say it was so. Now if he had some kind of metadata like say file indexes, project references etc. that'll help but otherwise he'll have an uphill battle trying to convince the court he lost anything at all.

        • Well, there's these things called contracts that stipulate how much you'll be paid for editing X footage for Y purpose, paid by Z.
        • by greenfruitsalad ( 2008354 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @02:26AM (#57640844)

          > how exactly do you prove in court it actually ever existed

          Easy. He'll show them the backups.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          The standard of proof is only "balance of probabilities", so all he really needs is some receipts showing he travelled to the places he shot the footage, equipment rental, that sort of thing. He could also show any prior video work he had done as evidence that it was his job and he was actively creating it.

  • by Crashmarik ( 635988 ) on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @08:57PM (#57639996)

    Nothing on Blu Ray ? No other external drives ? nothing ?

    Spend that much on creating it, you need to budget back it up.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @09:33PM (#57640188)

      Actually he did have backups. He kept a 2nd copy of each file in the same folder.

    • Juts to give the poor bastard the benefit of the doubt, maybe he had one backup drive... that he kept synced to the state of the primary drive.

      In that way you could have a backup and still delete all that stuff. :-(

      However, as soon as he realized anything was gone he should have immediately gone to recover the items from the raw data still left on disc (just not known by the file system), unless Adobe is doing some kind of fancy write-over-data? Seems unlikely.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Raw video from the camera is much larger than the final encoded output. If he shot in 4k it could be close to 400GB/hour. Even in 1080p BluRay isn't really practical for storing 500 hours of raw video, you need a file server and maybe some cloud storage if you have a fast internet connection.

      • Yeah somehow I doubt what he deleted was raw video seeing as using your numbers that would 500 hrs x 400 GB/HR = 200 TB of raw video
        You're going to need one real fast internet connection to move that around, just how much does that kind of cloud storage cost these days ?

        OTOH you can get 25gb BR-D for about 50 cents / disk ~= 2 cents/gig or 4 cents / clip

  • Seriously,
    You spend 250k capturing footage and don't have ANY backups?

    • Re:Backups? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by youngone ( 975102 ) on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @09:09PM (#57640058)
      I saw a news item a couple of years ago about a bloke who had his car stolen, with his laptop bag in it.
      In the bag were 7 (seven!) USB drive copies of his Thesis. He thought he had backed them up, but he had only made copies.
      I have very little sympathy for these sorts of people though.
      • When I was near finishing my PhD, I had my most recent backup close to hand, an older backup in another building, and a still older (but only a month or so) backup in a different city. I wasn't going to lose my thesis to no house fire or meteor strike.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • I have very little sympathy for these sorts of people though.

        Then you're a sociopath.

        This is you just revelling in the fact that you know about tech stuff and other people don't. He even took a cood crack at it for a non expert: he had multiple backups. He just didn't have them in distinct locations.

        Having a technical experitse in a particular area doesn't make you a superior person to someone whos expertise lies elsewhere. From your attitude you wouldn't feel sorry for anyone who wasn't a professional syst

        • He even took a cood crack at it for a non expert: he had multiple backups. He just didn't have them in distinct locations.

          Having your media cache mixed in with your media files is not "multiple backups" by any stretch of the imagination.

          Having a technical experitse in a particular area doesn't make you a superior person to someone whos expertise lies elsewhere

          When you have $250,000 worth of media files you need to either know wtf you're doing, or you need to hire someone who does. Knowing that makes you far superior to a person who doesn't.

    • by mikael ( 484 )

      First thing our technical director in an art studio said was "copy the images into an 'originals' directory on the server, set all the file permissions to read only and no touchy touchy". We always presumed he was talking about image editing.

  • by Nkwe ( 604125 ) on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @09:13PM (#57640068)
    Much better headline. Or to get with the times, "You will never guess how much this man lost by failing to backup his data".
    • by mattyj ( 18900 )

      Another interesting story would be if we could find out if this bug always existed or was introduced at a later time, and how the crack team of software engineers and testers at Adobe let it get into a product. I bet that store has more boneheads involved than just this guy.

  • by azuroff ( 318072 ) on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @09:16PM (#57640084)

    Adobe's lawyers will point to the Terms of Use (https://www.adobe.com/legal/terms.html) that he agreed to before using the software, and that will be that.

    9.2 We specifically disclaim all liability for any actions resulting from your use of any Services or Software. You may use and access the Services or Software at your own discretion and risk, and you are solely responsible for any damage to your computer system or loss of data that results from the use of and access to any Service or Software.

    • by JoeyRox ( 2711699 ) on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @09:21PM (#57640120)
      Except Adobe can't just waive away any liability with the stroke of a pen. There are existing laws and precedents which would supersede that clause, including implied warranties of fitness.
      • by Comrade Ogilvy ( 1719488 ) on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @10:23PM (#57640364)

        Bingo. There is a reason why there is actually a thing taught in law school called Contract Law, and that one of the fundamental concepts of contract law is "the meeting of minds"*. Interpreting something in a contract or EULA in a manner that most people would find strange is always open to the challenge that it is not reasonable to believe that one party understood the agreement in that manner, so a judge might decide to void it.

        In this case, the idea that Adobe software might nuke files in within some directory under its "control" is something people might accept. But that it can nuke files somewhere else or "nearby" is not.

        * "The meeting of minds" is not some arbitrary concept. It is a logical necessity when using any human language that is not perfectly unambiguous under every scenario, i.e. every language. Because if the language of a contract can be interpreted in multiple ways, what do you do? Flip a coin? No, you try and understand what the parties involved were probably thinking.

        • by BoogieChile ( 517082 ) on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @10:37PM (#57640424)

          This wasn't somewhere else or "nearby" though. This was "In the directory that is used for storing temporary files".

          It's analogous to storing not-particularly-important email in the folder your email client calls "Junk" and then being surprised when they get irretrievably deleted.

          • by Ichijo ( 607641 )
            No, his cache folder was inside his videos folder, and when he cleared his cache, it deleted the entire contents of his videos folder.
        • In this case, the idea that Adobe software might nuke files in within some directory under its "control" is something people might accept. But that it can nuke files somewhere else or "nearby" is not.

          That is certainly reasonable and the reasonable directories to which Adobe would have authorization would/could be the installation directory, any temporary directories created by the software, and any directories the user explicitly instructed Adobe to utilize in its operation.

      • I can imagine the comments here when systemd decides to clobber /home. They sure won't be "lol should have made backups".

      • Except Adobe can't just waive away any liability with the stroke of a pen.

        This is true, but there's also a thing called "duty to mitigate" that Adobe will almost certainly bring up. If the data was truly that valuable, Adobe will argue that a reasonable person would have taken steps to protect it, i.e. made backups, and thus mitigated the potential damage from any error on Adobe's part, or from something else like a failed drive. Not taking the drive to a professional data recovery service right away wil

    • And if someone else clicked that agreement Instead of him? (Backups aside) i would say you have a reasonable thought that the software wouldnâ(TM)t delete everything you have just because it was in proximity to your files
    • As long as they don't do something silly like advertise it as a tool for professionals, then that might even protect them in some way. ;)

      Contracts do not overrule law, even common law. They can't escape their claim of merchantability for specific purposes.

  • So super Dave Cooper is going to blame Adobe because HE failed. Good luck with that.

    “Destiny doesn’t make appointments, nor does she waste her time with the naive and unready!”
    - Farnam

  • If so, It was the guys own fault for using his external video folder as his cache folder. Its not a bug when you clean up the temp folder. PEBKAC nothing more nothing less. If not, well It probably was the guys own fault anyway.

  • It would be "man sues external hard drive manufacture for losing $250k of videos when disk fails"

    • It depends, was it caused by a design flaw, or was it just one of a small number of drives that are expected to fail earlier due to manufacturing variances?

      Also, was it advertised as a way to store important files, or as a convenience item?

      Is the devil not in the details, after all?

  • Sigh. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by AJWM ( 19027 ) on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @11:00PM (#57640504) Homepage

    Among other things, I'm a professional writer. My stuff might be worth 250k if you compared my royalties to what an annuity would get you. Or maybe I'm being optimistic; novels have something of a half-life.

    Either way, when I'm done with a writing/editing session, a save script copies the files (as new files, it does not overwrite) to my other desktop computer, to an NFS server, and to a RAID'ed NAS. And to a USB flash drive which I keep on my person at (almost) all times. Occasionally I'll burn a disc to store off-site. Now, I realize a photographer's files are going to take up a hell of a lot more disk space than my mostly-text files, but drives (and optical discs) are cheap.

    If your livelihood even partly depends on digital data, make more freakin' backups than you know what to do with. A writer friend of mine had a house fire (years ago) and lost all his manuscripts. He now keeps more backups than I do. (And no, the cloud is for convenience, not for real backups.)

    (Of course, if worst came to worst, all my previously-published works are backed up on Amazon's servers and hard-copies all over the place. I'd only lose the as yet unpublished stuff.) ;)

  • I've found that Adobe Premier has some poor file management decisions built into it. Adobe has always done it's own thing irrespective of operating system conventions and procedures as far as temporary files and folders are concerned

    Though, content creators need multiple backups at every step of the process. A video editing program like many content creation, engineering, and scientific programs are very demanding on computer systems. Anything can happen.

    Unfortunately because of Internet patch-as-you-sell

  • When someone claims person Y's life was worth $Z, I inquire as to if they had >=$Z life insurance on Y. If not, they are lying about the value of Y's life to them.

    In this case, the question is "Were these files worth backing up in case a house fire destroyed them?". If the answer is "No", then I know how little they are worth (given the low cost of offsite backups either via sneakernet or via the internet or other communication medium). If the answer is "Yes", then the damages (if any) would just be the

  • by fred911 ( 83970 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @02:17AM (#57640828) Journal

    Come on dude, we know its your porn collection.

  • 1. external drives have nearly 0 I/O. Just undelete the files. No other data was written to the drive so there's a 100% chance of getting 100% of the data back.
    2. he signed a EULA releasing Adobe from any damage caused by the software
    3. why didn't he back anything up? External drives fail all the time.
    • 1. External drive I/O varies. This is the era of Apple building "desktops" with non-removable/non-upgradeable HDDs. Newer USB3 SSD external drives are not unusable performance wise. External drives sometimes end up with quite a bit of I/O.
  • While I think humanity would be best served if we take the Adobe exec team, wrapped them into barbed wire and shot them into the sun and let the company itself and all its products and services die in a fire (Hint: I don't like Adobe too much and for good reasons) I'm not sure if they are entirely to blaim in this case.

    In short: Anything could've taken out that drive / directory with the critical data.

    If you've got critical data and you're not doing regular overturning backups, it's you who needs a solid ki

  • Read the ULA.
  • Running without backup is gross negligence by any sane standard. This person should get nothing.

  • If the videos / video clips had a value of $250 000, then why didn't he have them safely backed? Maybe Adobe shouldn't of cleared the entire cache folder but who is honestly dumb enough to store files in a cache folder as means of protecting them? Using a cache folder to store your video files, is no different then using the recycle bin, on Windows, then blaming Microsoft for deleting all your files when you emptied the trash.

The rule on staying alive as a program manager is to give 'em a number or give 'em a date, but never give 'em both at once.

Working...